Poland’s ruling party has made hardline opposition to immigration central to its brand – but it has emerged that a top official may have corruptly facilitated hundreds of thousands of visa applications from Asia and Africa.
Poland’s fiercely anti-immigration government has come under fire for allegedly granting hundreds of thousands of work visas in exchange for bribes.
Poland’s anti-corruption watchdog has launched an investigation into the affair less than a month before a crucial general election that could see the populist ruling party, PiS, swept from power.
The still-evolving scandal began in late August, when the country’s foreign ministry was raided by the local anti-corruption agency. Shortly afterwards, Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk was sacked for failing to cooperate with the investigation.
Wawrzyk was officially forced out of his job for ‘insufficient cooperation’ with the investigation, but Polish media are now reporting that he is suspected of helping to set up the scheme and pressuring consuls to issue visas to people of his choosing.
Last week he was reportedly hospitalised with life-threatening injuries after an apparent suicide attempt.
It soon emerged that a cash-for-visa scheme allowed would-be immigrants in a developing African country to buy “stamped visas” from middlemen by simply paying cash and “writing a name”.
In other developing countries, a payment of €4,500 was enough to secure a visa from a Polish consulate via an intermediary company.
Polish consulates now under investigation include outposts in countries ranging from Taiwan and the Philippines to Tanzania and Nigeria.
The Polish outlet Onet, which has uncovered much of the scandal, reported that last year a group of applicants from India, posing as Bollywood filmmakers, were granted work visas in connection with a non-existent film project called “Asati”. Later, another, larger group was granted visas through the same route on the basis that they were making a film called “Milton in Malta”.
The pile-on
While the details of the scheme are still emerging, other EU states – many of which Poland and its allies have blamed for mismanaging the refugee influx into the Schengen area – have expressed alarm at the suspiciously high number of immigrants entering the zone on Polish visas.
The German government has asked Poland for a “rapid and complete clarification” of the situation, summoning the Polish ambassador and demanding that Warsaw “clarify the date and number of visas issued, as well as the nationalities of the beneficiaries”.
However, the government is particularly vulnerable to criticism from domestic political opponents as the scandal has exploded just a month before crucial parliamentary elections.
The PiS party, which has governed since 2015, is campaigning hard on an anti-immigration agenda. Polls show PiS is currently the most popular party, but it is likely to fall short of an outright majority in parliament – raising the prospect that Poland could finally move away from the right-wing populism that has repeatedly put it at odds with Brussels and other EU countries.
Since coming to power, the party has been accused of eroding fundamental rights and freedoms and steadily undermining the independence of the judiciary and media.
Now the opposition contesting the elections is capitalising on the immigration scandal. Donald Tusk, the relatively liberal former prime minister hoping to return to power, has accused the government of knowingly allowing large numbers of illegal migrants into the European continent, contrary to its insistence that it is keeping them out.
Tusk claimed last week that as many as 250,000 visas issued by Polish consulates and embassies may now be under suspicion, although the government claims the number is actually in the low hundreds.
The drama surrounding the scandal is so intense that an MP from the opposition Civic Coalition was briefly detained by police this week after she used a megaphone to interrupt a campaign speech by incumbent President Mateusz Morawiecki, shouting information about the visa scandal before officers removed her from the event.
In addition to socially conservative positions on abortion and LGBT rights, and a constant drumbeat about the alleged threat of Russian influence in Polish politics, PiS has long banked on its success in building a fence along the Belarusian border. The barrier is intended in part to keep out illegal “Muslim” immigrants.
